I love politcal theory. This piece from Charlie Stross is a rather fun read – if not for the snark then for the ideas themselves. You should read the whole thing but he talks about how, regardless of what political party you are a part of, you are no different than the other person.

Overall, the nature of the problem seems to be that our representative democratic institutions have been captured by meta-institutions that implement the iron law of oligarchy by systematically reducing the risk of change. They have done so by converging on a common set of policies that do not serve the public interest, but minimize the risk of the parties losing the corporate funding they require in order to achieve re-election. And in so doing, they have broken the “peaceful succession when enough people get pissed off” mechanism that prevents revolutions. If we’re lucky, emergent radical parties will break the gridlock (here in the UK that would be the SNP in Scotland, possibly UKIP in England: in the USA it might be the new party that emerges if the rupture between the Republican realists like Karl Rove and the Tea Party radicals finally goes nuclear), but within a political generation (two election terms) it’ll be back to oligarchy as usual.

He has great theories on the nature of our political systems and how we got to a near global state of forced status quo. Unfortunately, there isn’t much he believes we can do to fix it because you become what you formed to rally against.